The greatest thing in all the world is to love....

Nat King Cole sang a song that says "The greatest thing in all the world is to love and be loved in return". What happens if you are not loved in return?  It can be devastating and destructive.  Some people end up destroying themselves or others over being rejected.   Love is a very potent energy.  It can make you do really stupid things.  

How does one find the courage to love again?  Based on my own personal experience, you must learn to love unconditionally.  Sometimes people need something different in their lives and if you really love them, you will understand and accept what is best for the person that you love, no matter how painful it may be to you.  Another term for this is selfless love.  

I am still very much in love with my first boyfriend.  We came to understand that there is no way we could be together and parting was very painful.  I carry him fondly in my heart with the understanding that we each need different things in our life.  Accepting this does not invalidate our love for each other but it does free us up to love again.  

Unconditional love is not an antidote to the pain you feel when you must let someone go out of your life.  But it is the key to forgiveness and forgiveness is the key to loving again.  When you learn to love unconditionally, you begin to understand that your love is not based on being loved in return. The greatest thing in all the world is to love.  That is where the song should end.

It takes courage to love but you cannot find courage without love.  Here is one of my favorite quotes.  Perhaps fodder for another post?  Will see.    

“Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.”   ― Delmore Schwartz, Last and Lost Poems

How will we live tomorrow?

A little over a year ago an acquaintance was planning a cross country bicycle trip.  He sent out to a number of his contacts a question that he asked us to respond to and his intention was to explore this question with the people he met across the country.  The question, "How will we live tomorrow?" was provocative so I wanted to share my thoughts here.

How will we live tomorrow?

To answer this question we must first define living and then define tomorrow.  Living implies having a life as opposed to mere survival.  To the spiritual mind, living implies being awake as opposed to just going through the motions of life.  If we live in a wakeful state of consciousness, the physical conditions in which we experience life are merely that, experiences.  In my youth, I read a book by Kilgore Trout (aka Kurt Vonnegut) called Venus on the Halfshell.  The premise of the book is that the last living human on earth is left with a spaceship and a robot programmed for sex.  Their mission was to travel the universe asking the primordial question of ‘Why was man created to suffer and die?’  Man was not created to suffer and die, man was created to experience creation.  Once while pondering these thoughts of purpose, the following comment came into my mind.  ‘Your awareness allows me to experience my creation’.  I wrote this on my mirror so that I would see it every morning.  Then I received an overwhelming feeling that the statement was wrong.  The correction came as “My awareness allows me to experience my creation.  So back to the original question of ‘How will we live..’?  We will live in a state of awareness of who we are.

So the second part of your question concerns tomorrow.  How will we live tomorrow.  What is tomorrow for there is only now.  Quite an esoteric statement that has become a cliche.  We are living in a linear, time based consciousness and therefore there will be a tomorrow within this reality.  For the mystic, even if we destroy the world, mankind is destined to wake up to the reality of who we really are.  That is the tomorrow we are all waiting for.  So how we live tomorrow will be dictated by how we live today.  If you believe in the eternity of the energy we identify with as being human, then we will never cease to have experience but the experience of tomorrow will be determined by our actions of today.  There is a meme that pops up in my Facebook  feed occasionally about the wisdom of the old man that plants a tree whose shade he will never sit under.  The real wisdom of this meme is that the old man is planting a tree that will provide shade for a future incarnation of himself.  We are the children that will inherit the earth we leave behind.  This is the irony of tomorrow.  

Perhaps your question should be ‘How will we live today?’

Understanding intention is the key to forgiveness

We have all been hurt by someone that we love.  Sometimes the hurt is so extreme that we find it hard to forgive.  We may say that we forgive but the next time you find yourself in a similar situation with this person, the anger and pain of the previous hurt compiles on top of the current hurt until there is an underlying seething that is always ready to surface, sometimes at the most minor incident.

How can we get past these feelings?  Forgiveness.  I don't mean the kind of forgiveness that someone says they are sorry and you say, "okay, I forgive you" and you move on but place that hurt in a folder to take out next time it happens.  True forgiveness comes from not just letting go of the pain but also letting go of the incident that caused the pain.  Not putting it into a folder to save for the next time.

The key to forgiveness is in understanding the intentions of the other person.  You can only do this through Agape - unconditional love.  Agape is the purist kind of love because it transcends the ego.

When you love someone unconditionally, you can easily forgive because you can see through the persona of the person into their core.  You can see their heart.  When you can see someones heart then you know their intentions.  If there is no malice with intent to hurt you then how can you not forgive?

Love has many flavors but love in the purist form is unconditional.  It will not shield you from being hurt but it will allow you to forgive and continue loving.  Love is the most precious and valuable experience a human can have.  All the riches in the world cannot buy love.